Dungeon Hack (DOS) - Gameplay - No Commentary

This is some blind run gameplay of the DOS game Dungeon Hack from 1993 by TSR/SSI. The game is part of the "Forgotten Realms: The Archives - Collection Three" on both GOG and Steam (I'm playing the GOG version here). The game itself plays as a real-time first person dungeon crawler with grid based movement. Thankfully it has an automap that works pretty well. It has a randomly generated dungeon system where every time you play the game, the layout is completely different, unless you manually pick a level generation seed. The game also lets you use the number pad for movement instead of forcing you to use the directional buttons. That's incredibly helpful for dodging around enemies to prevent them from hitting you. This one is a little odd for a D&D game in that you only have a single character rather than a group of characters like you normally would. I play with one of the pre-generated characters instead of spending time rolling out my own (I use the human paladin for this run). The manual says that hard mode in this game does a permadeath thing where it will delete all saves for your character when you get killed, so I went with moderate difficulty. Speaking of the manual, it reads like an AD&D player manual more than a game manual. By that I mean it gives somewhat useful general information while not giving you any actual hard detailed information on items and mechanics. Want to know which long sword does more damage or if the mace is stronger? Guess you'll have to just try them out and guestimate based on the damage shown since it's not in the manual and the game doesn't show. Want to know what that ring or amulet that you just equipped does? Have fun figuring it out, because the game won't tell you, that is unless it's cursed and now you can't take it off. For me the game just does kind of a poor job of giving the player anything beyond the most basic of information. The game also suffers from some of that classic AD&D "we hate you for playing our game" system, where there are monsters that take away XP and levels just by hitting you. Permanently losing levels from being attacked just isn't a fun mechanic for me. The plot for the game seems pretty generic as well, being "find the orb", which is as basic as it gets. That kind of plot is fine for games like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but I generally expect more from a D&D game. I stop my playthrough a little into floor 5 of 18. Each floor takes forever to finish since they're fairly large and the enemies are kind of tough to even land hits on. The enemies also never stop randomly spawning. Early on in the run I evidently end up with what I'll call a Ring of Food, which seems to stop the food bar from draining. I actually thought the game was bugged at first when my food bar wasn't going down until I tested it out with the rest system. I can't imagine how rough the game would be without that ring since there doesn't seem to be an abundance of food drops and any time you camp to restore health, it takes an absurd amount of game time to fully heal (restoring roughly 25HP takes around 150 game hours). I still have no idea what any of the amulets I found do, if anything. The manual says that since the helmet I equipped puts a red box around my character portrait, that means it's giving me some form of magical defense, but who knows what it actually is. At one point I end up equipping some bracers that are cursed and seem to "drop" my AC to 10 (high AC is bad in AD&D). I follow that up with accidentally saving over my main save game and I didn't want to waste time reloading with an older save, so I just rolled with it. Turns out that was a terrible idea and I should have just used the slightly older restore immediately. I thought I might run into a scroll of Remove Curse at some point, but never saw a single one. The manual lists Remove Curse as a level 4 mage spell, so if the scroll even exists, it might not show up until much later floors. I think my run is pretty much busted without the ability to remove my cursed equipment. With the bad AC, every monster starts consistently hitting like a truck and I can be taken down from full health to dead in just a few hits. Also, I start encountering more of the XP/level stealing monsters at the very end of the video, which honestly makes me not want to play this anymore. I probably would have happily suffered through it back when it was released, but now I'd rather move on to something else.